Migrating features over to InDesign

[Bodvar Bjorgvinsson]

Thanks. Very helpful, indeed.

Bodvar

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 8:40 AM, Paul Findon <pfindon at infopage.net> wrote:
> Framers,
>
> Following the recent discussion of FM features migrating to InDesign,
> here's a snippet from an interview between Adobe Co-Chairman John
> Warnock and Conrad Taylor, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group
> in 2004.
>
> Paul
>
>
> Interviewer: Adobe has found itself in the situation of owning three
> page make-up systems: PageMaker, InDesign and FrameMaker. I'm not
> counting Illustrator for these purposes. When one starts to think
> about Adobe getting involved in document composition issues, it's
> time to pull out the flipchart and brainstorm about what are the
> important aspects of document composition to support; which direction
> to go. Those of us who use these tools often look around at other
> software: 3B2 does this, Xyvision does this, Quark does this;
> wouldn't it be nice to put them all in the blender, so to speak, and
> extract one ideal application.
>
> Warnock: Well, that's a complicated problem. And there's a fair bit
> of disagreement inside of Adobe as to what the appropriate thing is
> to do. PageMaker as a codebase was just very long in the tooth: it
> was not a maintainable codebase. It was clear when we acquired it
> that it was not going to last for very long. Too much spaghetti-code:
> very difficult. InDesign had just started as a project when we
> acquired Aldus, and we continued with a very strong group of people:
> Robert Brainsea and Zak Williamson, and a very strong group of people
> who built the architecture for InDesign. But they were coming at it
> from a very 'let's go build magazines' kind of perspective. Then
> there was the other set of the world that works with highly
> structured documents, and the FrameMaker world. And I absolutely love
> FrameMaker; I've been a very strong proponent of FrameMaker. But
> FrameMaker was also suffering from an old codebase. Essentially, the
> idea is to start migrating features over to InDesign. Unfortunately,
> the InDesign crowd doesn't understand the structured document world
> as well as they need to, and so that migration has been coming along
> more slowly than I would have liked it to have been.
>
> Interviewer: Some of the pagination issues, and table-handling…
>
> Warnock: Yes, and cross-referencing, and forward-referencing, and all
> the things about dealing with highly structured documents. I'm a
> structured-document person: I like them!
>
> Interviewer: You're in good company here! I've been using FrameMaker
> for Macintosh since version 2.1. And now I shall be using Frame 7.0
> on the Mac under Classic mode – for the rest of time, perhaps.
>
> Warnock: Well hopefully someday there will be a version of InDesign
> that will have the same properties. And to InDesign's credit, there
> are people who have done math plug-ins and have started to get the
> more arcane things into InDesign. But they haven't fundamentally
> solved the structure problem.
>
>
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